Washington’s trade war threats to China have only strengthened Beijing’s high-tech ambitions, but a culture of bureaucracy could easily smother efforts to become the world’s innovation hub, according to a leading China opinion maker.
On Saturday and Sunday in Beijing, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross gathered with Chinese Vice Premier Liu He for trade talks that resulted in China warning the U.S. that anything negotiated will be void if Washington sets up new sanctions.
Sunday’s lead op-ed in The South China Morning Post (SCMP), Hong Kong’s leading English language newspaper, notes that Beijing reacted “cooly” to what it views as President Trump’s “brinkmanship negotiation tactics” driven “by short-term political considerations” to get tough on China by threatening hefty steel tariffs in the name of U.S. national security.
But Wang Xiangwei, the SCMP’s former editor-in-chief now based in Beijing, argues a deeper and more specific game is actually playing out.
“In short, curbing China’s technological advances seems to have become Washington’s top priority,” he writes.
Mr. Xiangwei noted that President Xi Jinping last week delivered a keynote speech to China’s top scientists and implored them to lead the world in science and tech development. Implicit in the message: that Beijing would be the focal point in planning, financing and promoting the effort.
Mr. Xi, it was pointed out, enjoys “citing momentous projects like China’s first atomic bomb, H-bomb and its satellites, which were developed in very difficult circumstances in the 1960s and early 1970s” — all with heavy government oversight.
But China’s more recent tech successes, including leading internet and telecom firms like Baidu, Huawei, and Alibaba, worked because “the government basically left them alone.”
Mr. Xiangwei suggests that Washington’s trade war threats are also efforts to “wean China’s massive state funding and subsidies off its hi-tech ambitions.” But these could backfire in the short term and actually “embolden Beijing to double down on its pursuit of hi-tech developments” — which appears to be happening.
In the long term, however, China’s desire to intervene, its rigid education and its compartmentalized management of tech research “are stunning blocks to innovation.” There is also the matter of dedicating precious public funds to risky innovation projects, many of which fail.
“In the past few years, China has consistently made the most patent applications in the world,” Mr. Xiangwei writes. “But China’s path to becoming a world leader in innovation is still an uphill battle. … China’s manufacturing sector as a whole would need 30 years merely to catch up with U.S.”
• Dan Boylan can be reached at dboylan@washingtontimes.com.
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